The American Maritime Partnership (AMP), the voice of the domestic maritime industry, has released a statement pointing to “the sheer number of factual errors” in a recently published report entitled “The Jones Act: Protectionism v. Global Trade,” and produced by the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure (AII).
“The publication is littered with fabrications intended to mislead policymakers and we demand a retraction of the report,” said Tom Allegretti, Chairman of AMP. “It is shocking that a nonprofit organization led by former senior members of the U.S. military would produce such a factually inaccurate report and take such a myopic view of an important national security issue.” AMP seeks to set the record straight by correcting more than a dozen factual errors presented in the Aii report:
CLAIM: There are “about six dozen Jones Act-qualified vessels” in operation.
FACT: There are approximately 40,000 vessels in the Jones Act fleet.
CLAIM: The report asserts the GAO has found that “the price per gallon of gasoline [in Puerto Rico] is 15 cents per gallon higher … than it would be in the absence of Jones Act requirements.”
FACT: Actually, the GAO found there was no way to estimate a “cost” of the Jones Act, if any, because it was impossible to know which American domestic commerce laws would be applied to foreign shipping companies if the Jones Act were repealed. The 15 cent figure cited by Aii exists nowhere in the GAO report.
